Java Desktop links of the week, March 9th

This week there is a rather large amount of JavaFX news, but very little Swing news. I guess this is a sign of the times :-)

Swing

• Coming into my feed reader after posting this blog, I thought I'd quickly add that Ken Orr has a blog post about creating a custom HUD-style combo box.
• Alexander Potochkin has blogged that the Swing Application Framework is back again. For more background, check out this interview with Hans Muller, back when the project was first approved. SAF has had a turbulent life, most recently with Karsten Lentzsch disapproving of its current state, and whether or not it actually will make it into Java 7 is yet to be seen.
• InformIT has a post discussing playing media in Java using JMC. All code samples are written in Java, not JavaFX Script.
• Regarding Swing 2.0, in the 13/02/09 podcast of This Ain't Your Dad's Java!, Sun's Java marketing team has briefly discussed the recent discussion around Swing 2.0. You can listen to the podcast here if you have iTunes (skip forward to around the 5:00 mark. It continues until around the 9:15 minute mark). Their general perspective was that people wanting Swing 2.0 are trolling, whiney and fanboys. Also, despite their protests that Swing is strong, they inferred a number of  times that Swing  is on its way out. I found their means of communication to be somewhat condescending and rude, but perhaps that's just me. For marketing people who are putting out the opinion of Sun, I found this to be disappointing.

JavaFX

• Michael Heinrichs continues his best practices for JavaFX mobile applications with part 4. This post has two tips: use the prescaling functionality and use background loading. I referred to the previous three parts in last weeks post, but for quick references, here they are again: parts 1, 2 and 3.
• Sergey Malenkov has a small code sample of how to use text reflection to add the overused reflection effect to a digital clock. My advice, use reflection with caution, and the simplicity of adding reflection scares me - JavaFX GUIs presently look like toys without the need for over the top reflection!
• Rakesh Menon has a post up that covers a number of topics which results in a JavaFX RSS viewer. The RSS viewer is primarily HTML, but it is controlled by JavaFX, and therefore demonstrates parsing RSS feeds and interacting with an HTML page via JavaScript.
• Osvaldo Pinali blogs about his improvements to JavaFX Balls, which implements the Bubblemark animation test. He has managed to port it to work on mobile devices, and whilst he has published a webstart demo, the link isn't presently working.
• Simon Brocklehurst has a blog post titled 'JavaFX eats its own dogfood' that talks about a simple application that lets you manipulate rectangles, and see the resulting JavaFX code. There is a webstart link that you can use to run it.
• There is a brief overview of how JavaFX handles (or ignores) NullPointerExceptions. Despite his requests for a discussion, there doesn't appear to be any comments.
• Jan Erik Paulsen has an opinion piece on JavaFX, claiming that Sun is pulling a 'Netscape rewrite' with JavaFX.
• Per Bothner has two posts about writing a read-eval-print loop in JavaFX. A REPL (also called a command shell) allows you to type in expressions, have them be immediately evaluated, and the result displayed. This is very useful for experimenting with or learning a language.
• Johan has a post about creating a JavaFX asynchronous chat client.
• As always, Josh Marinacci (@joshmarinacci) is keen that you check out JFXStudio for lots of cool JavaFX samples.

Eclipse/SWT

• Chris Aniszczyk has a post announcing new Nebula SWT widgets.  There are a number of interesting widgets and components that look very nice.
• Somewhat unrelated to this blog, but probably helpful to many, Marcel has a post discussing the most important Eclipse shortcuts. In the comments section people have replied with what they believe to be the most important NetBeans shortcuts.